The Bride

The Bride! is a fever dream of a classic horror story reinvisioned as glam pop spectacle, part Bonnie and Clyde crime spree, part song-and-dance extravaganza, and all political provocation. Where the 1935 original gave its titular character fewer than five minutes of screen time and not a single line of dialogue, director Maggie Gyllenhaal's film expands that absence into an entire reckoning, following the Bride as she claws toward an identity she was never meant to have, hoisted back from the ever after against her will, assembled to mend a man's loneliness. She did not ask to exist.

Her recurring refrain is "I would prefer not to," borrowed from Melville's Bartleby, and the phrase is more complicated than it first appears. It is not a hard NO. It is a preference, softly stated, phrased in the grammar of deference even as it functions as defiance. For a film explicitly about women being denied agency, that irony cuts deep and may be the smartest thing in it.

Set in 1930s Chicago, the world Gyllenhaal constructs is a dizzying but familiar pastiche of mobsters, corrupt police, speakeasies, and a culture at a breaking point. From the sex workers to the detectives to the monsters, women are fed up, and the director builds her entire narrative architecture around that exhaustion. No male character escapes indictment. Not a single one. Frank, played by Christian Bale with a quiet, aching melancholy, gaslights the woman he believes he loves while nursing an almost tender obsession with Ronnie Reed, a glittering silver screen song-and-dance man he emulates whenever possible. His loneliness is real. His harm is real. The film insists you hold both at once.

Jessie Buckley's Bride is feral and unapologetically impulsive. She is not reckless, exactly, because recklessness implies ignorance of consequences. She simply does not recognize the authority being asserted over her. She does not know who she is, but she knows precisely what she doesn’t want, and Buckley plays that contradiction with ferocious, electric energy. She is an intelligent force of grief and curiosity and contempt for compliance, and she does not ask for your sympathy.

Visually, the film is stunning. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher's camera moves with an unsteady, lurching energy, stumbling through the frame like the Bride herself, reanimated and not in full command of her broken body. From Chicago's amber cinema glow to the neon crush of Times Square, the production design walks a fine line between swanky grandeur and deliberate restraint. The laboratory of Dr. Euphronius, brought to life by an elegantly unhinged Annette Bening, is coldly spare and defiantly unglamorous, which makes it feel genuinely scientific in a way that Guillermo del Toro's opulent cathedral of a lab in his recent Frankenstein did not. This may be a dream, but Gyllenhaal keeps it firmly rooted in the texture of the real world.

The opening weekend numbers confirmed what the marketing department probably already knew: The Bride! is not a film for everyone. There is not enough horror for horror audiences, too much strange humor for drama audiences, and an unapologetically feminist fury that some viewers will call an agenda and others will call The Point. None of that changes what an accomplishment this is. Breathing new life into old ideas is harder than it looks. Gyllenhaal does it with bolt of lightning.